Day Symposium at the University of NorthumbriaFriday 7th September 2012

The notion of ‘subcultures’, articulated most prominently by Dick Hebdige in his 1979 seminal work, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, has undergone much revision in recent years. However a critical engagement with gender remains absent within the majority of work on ‘subcultures’. Indeed, Angela McRobbie’s (1980) ‘Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique’ provides the cornerstone of our symposium, in terms of interrogating how gender is articulated in ‘underground’ cultural and social environments. The question of whether ‘subculture’ is still a valid term and how far ‘subcultural’ manifestations are reductively incorporated into the mainstream are relevant topics on the academic agenda. However research of girls and women’s subcultural productions and engagements from queer, feminist and transgender scholars (e.g. Jack Halberstam, Doreen Piano, Susan Driver, Elizabeth K Keenan, Mary Celeste Kearney and Kath Browne) carve out a new territory for understanding the ‘subcultural’. Given this reevaluation, it is timely to re-engage with how ‘subcultural’ genders (both femininities and masculinities) are represented in alternative society and discuss how far this can be politically subversive. For instance, the revival, nostalgia and popularity of rockabilly style, burlesque, roller derby, Slutwalks, Ladyfests, fanzine/blogging networks, Suicide Girls, Guerrilla Girls, riot grrrl and the participation of girls in underground music cultures all point to the need for an academic engagement with strategies of cultural resistance to dominant identities and norms.

On the back of his published diary (A Year with Swollen Appendices, Faber 1996) Brian Eno describes himself variously as: a mammal, a father, an artist, a celebrity, a pragmatist, a computer- user, an interviewee, and a ‘drifting clarifier’. To this list we might add rock star (on the first two Roxy Music albums); the creator of lastingly influential music (Another Green World; Music for Airports); a trusted producer (for Talking Heads, U2, Coldplay and a host of other artists); the maker of large-scale video and installation artworks; a maker of apps and interactive software; and so on, and so on. All in all, he is one of the most feted and most influential musical figures of the past forty years (even though he himself has consistently downplayed his musical abilities, describing himself as an anti-musician on more than one occasion).

Improvisation is arguably the most widely distributed form of musical practice – and yet remains the least studied or understood. Indeed, even the boundaries of what is or is not regarded as improvisation remain unclear. This conference will address the many faces of improvisation from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives – historical, psychological, ethnomusicological, analytical, technological, sociological, organological, and pedagogical. Over the course of four days, the conference will include papers, practical sessions, and poster presentations.

The conference is affiliated to the AHRC-funded Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP) and enjoys the support of SEMPRE, IMR, BFE, and SMA.